 | | SLOWFOOD IRELAND – Grandmother’s Day | | | Slow Food was founded in Italy 1986 by the eminent Italian food critic and journalist Carlo Petrini. The international movement was launched in Paris in 1989.
Slow Food aims are first and foremost to educate people about this wonderful culinary resource in the face of the over-commercialisation and homogenisation of our food.
Through education, and what Petrini termed the eco-gastronomic intervention, Slow seeks to conserve endangered seed, breed, cultivar, and process. This scenario is exemplified in the following anecdote: up at the top of a Tuscan valley, there are only two eighty-year old men remaining who know how to make the local sausage, a delicacy based upon a similarly endangered breed of a hardy little red cow. The Slow intervention involves the enlistment of young people to learn the sausage-making technique; incentives for local farmers to breed and expand the shrinking herd of the rare cow; the recording of the production parameters; and assistance in seeking a wider, lucrative market, enabling the product to become self-sustaining, redounding to the benefit of consumers who are guaranteed access to the once-endangered food, the producers and the wider local socio-economy.
Hence, Slow Food is an idea and a belief; the idea is that by celebrating the magnificent foods that are under threat from standardisation, bureaucratic hygienism, and commercialisation, we can ensure that these products continue to be made and, having the future of these foods, we are then able to enjoy them! One of the key tenets of Slow Food is the belief in the right to pleasure!
"The Slow Food movement is unique in harnessing a true virtue of practicality to support its core philosophy. Slow Food's recognition that pleasure lies at the very heart of our food culture is one of the most profound and provocative antidotes to the fast food/fast life mania.
Slow Food is the future, and the movement generously allows us all to play our own part in shaping this future."
| | | | We all celebrate Mother's Day - but what about grandmothers? And grandfathers? There has never been a day to honour them. Until now.
This year, on April 25, the world had its first international Grandmother's Day. The brainchild of Ballymaloe Cookery School's Darina Allen, a grandmother of six, the idea is to get children together with granny for a day in the kitchen. Along with cooking and recipes - whether that's rustling up soups, baking scones, or flipping pancakes - it's hoped that wily old grandmothers will also pass on their knowledge of skills like crochet, embroidery, even bee-keeping.
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| | | “It doesn't have to be restricted to recipes,” Allen says. “Grandfather could pass on tips for sewing (or sowing!), how to change a tyre on a bicycle, how to tie fishing flies. Learn it from your grandparents, ask them for the knowledge. It makes grandparents feel more important and appreciated. It creates a greater bond.”
When Allen mentioned the idea of an Irish Grandmother's Day to Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food Movement - an organisation that promotes local food traditions - the Italian said it was too good to restrict to Ireland. So the inaugural Grandmother's Day will be celebrated in 132 countries. In Ireland, the concept is endorsed by the Irish Countrywomen's Association, a brigade with many grandmothers in its ranks. The timing couldn't be better.
Granny knows best, after all, and in these straitened times we could do with her wisdom and thriftiness. “From a small budget, grandmothers were able to feed the family,” says Allen. “They could look in the fridge and make a meal out of all sorts of little scraps. They knew how to judge when food was safe. Nowadays, all that people' do is look at the ‘best before’ date and toss it in the bin. That is a skill that's lost - being able to judge it yourself when food is safe to eat and when it is not. It's a forgotten skill to be able
to make a meal, something delicious and lovely out of leftovers. These are all the skills we really need!”
Allen makes a compelling case. Earlier generations were more resourceful. In a “grab, gobble and go” culture, most 20- and 30-somethings are at a loss when it comes to fending for themselves with basic food ingredients.
Some of my son-in-law's friends - he lives in Cornwall - were working in the City and making megabucks; now they are in very changed circumstances,” says Allen. “One of them said to me, ‘Oh my God, I So envy Rupert and Lydia - who are my son-in-law and daughter. - because they have their little small holding, they grow vegetables and they have hens, they cook... I can hardly make myself a cup of coffee. Now I haven't got my job! It came home to me, again, how important it is that these skills are passed on to the younger people’.
Allen posits a number of theories as to why grandmother skills have not been passed on from generation to generation. Domestic science is no longer a widespread part of the school curriculum. We have become a ‘cash rich, time poor’ society. Often, both parents are working outside the home. It may even have been
deemed ‘uncool’ to cook and grow one's own produce, as it smacked of the bad old times.
Not anymore. It's de rigueur to be self-sufficient in terms of food and cooking, to wow your dinner party guests with homegrown dishes. Being able to present your guests with one of granny's old recipes is even more coveted. It is important not to lose old recipes.
"Oftentimes, you'll hear somebody saying, ‘oh, granny used to make a wonderful apple tart or a cake, I wish I'd asked her for the recipe’. “This is a very common thing,” she says. “All of us - not just smaller children and teenagers - who are fortunate enough to have grandparents alive, we must stop, for goodness sake, and ask them for their recipes. It's important to learn from them now to make sure that we don't leave it too late.
Having just lost my mother last year, I feel deeply grateful that I was in a position where my mother taught me so much. The fact that I can cook is really because I learned how to cook from holding onto her apron strings in the kitchen. From the time I was a little child, when she was making a loaf of soda bread - which she did almost every day of her life, until her death - she would hand me a little bit of the dough and I'd make a little cistín, and my little cake would be baked beside hers in the old cooker.”
As a grandmother, it's wonderful cooking with my grandchildren. They're just like little sponges. They soak up everything you tell them. They want to learn everything. With a lot of my smaller grandchildren, we also show them how to sow seeds, they help when we re sowing things in the garden. They grow radishes. And they'll eat any vegetable, as a result. There's a double whammy there.
The relationship between grandchildren and grandparents is a particularly precious one. It's very, very important for children to spend time with older people, with their grandparents, because it's a different kind of relationship. It gives them a different kind of attitude to older people and a deep love and bond is created. And there’s a safety there. You know sometimes. if your parents are cross with you, you can run to your grandparents. Grandparents, in general, are less judgemental”, she says, laughing.
“The beauty of the Grandmothers’ Day concept is that it will hopefully act as a Trojan horse, gently luring children into wholesome cooking practices by giving them the subliminal message that food, and the trappings that go with its production, is exciting, but not, of course, in the breakneck speed sense of excitement.
“We have to slow down and ask ‘what is it that we love in the end?”, say Allen. “Having special days with our grandparents, these are what out memories are made of. What grandchildren remember is ‘those times when we were cooking with grandma’ or ‘going to that old aunt’ or ‘buns’ or maybe ‘an apple tart’. One remembers these sorts of memories. A lot of our happiest childhood memories are connected to food in some way.”
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